eBay isn’t only about counterfeit designer handbags and boxes of all-marshmallow Lucky Charms, sometimes there’s actually something useful for sale. [Matt] found a bunch of Chinese-made ARM development boards with integrated LCD displays on the ‘bay, but without a reliable toolchain, these boards – as cool as they are – are nearly useless. Thankfully, he figured [...]

We love to see derivative works that take a great hack and make it even better. This LCD Laptop resurrection project is an excellent example. [Alex] took the work seen on this other FPGA LCD driver and delivered a leap forward on the final hardware packaging. The link at the top drops you into the second page of [Alex's] [...]

Here’s an external display meant to help you keep track of your computer’s status. It connects via USB and is driven by a PIC microcontroller. It listens for a small set of commands, using those to implement a simple control protocol to drive the screen. [Andrew Gehringer] designed the device around a PIC 18F2550, which offers [...]

[Jasper] sent in a project he, [Quinten], and [Mr. Stock] have been working on for a while. It’s called the Pristitrope and brings the classic 19th centrury paper-based animation device into the 21st century with 18 LCD displays. The lazy suzan portion of the build was fabricated out of plywood cut on a CNC router and [...]

[Jasper] sent in a project he, [Quinten], and [Mr. Stock] have been working on for a while. It’s called the Pristitrope and brings the classic 19th centrury paper-based animation device into the 21st century with 18 LCD displays. The lazy suzan portion of the build was fabricated out of plywood cut on a CNC router and [...]

[H. Smeitink] got his hands on a 320×240 color TFT LCD screen. He set out to drive it with a small PIC microcontroller but didn’t find a lot of help out there to get up and running quickly. This is surprising since it’s a really nice display for quite a low price (under $16 delivered [...]

[Tech2077] is one of the lucky ones who already got his hands on a Raspberry Pi. He’s been looking into different interface options with the GPIO header and just posted a guide to using an HD44780 character display with the RPi. We like this approach because instead of doing some hard-core LCD work he’s using [...]

One of [Sprite_tm]‘s colleagues recently challenged him to connect a small LCD touch screen to a Raspberry Pi. Sadly, [Sprite_tm] has yet to take delivery of a Raspberry Pi, but he did manage to connect an LCD to a Linux board without video capabilities. Because [Sprite_tm]‘s display has a 16-bit parallel interface, and 16 GPIO pins are [...]

You can find all kinds of LCD screens in broken electronics. But it’s often a chore to figure out how they are controlled if you don’t have a working device that can be used to sniff the communications protocol. [Justin] grabbed this character LCD screen from an old Brother printer and decided to see if [...]

This Arduino BASIC interpreter will make a really fun one-day project if you’ve already got the parts on hand. [Usmar A. Padow] put together an Arduino Uno, SD card, four line character LCD, and PS/2 keyboard. but he’s also included alternative options to go without an LCD screen by using a computer terminal, or without [...]

[Tom Fleet] spent the dreary weekend inside learning how to drive this T6963C based graphic LCD controller. Although this is his first time venturing away from HD44780 character displays, the availability of an Arduino library helped him go from being a newbie to coding his own animated graphics. The hardware setup is straight-forward. The screen [...]

LCD displays taken from old Nokia phones have been a staple of the hardware makers for years now, so we’re very happy to see [Andy] reverse engineering a full color QVGA display so we can move our grayscale projects over to a full-color display. The screen in a Nokia 2730, 5000, and 7100 cell phone is a [...]

[Cesar] recently got a PSP display up and running with his FPGA development board. That’s a nice project, but what we really like is that he set aside a lot of time to show how it’s done every step of the way. This isn’t just a tutorial on that particular screen, but an overview of [...]

Text LCD’s are handy for any occasion, a printer port on your PC is also darn handy as well. Mix together and add in a splash of linux and you get a very handy Linux device driver for a 16×2 LCD connected to the parallel port. Electrically the LCD is wired up in a typical [...]

Apparently, there’s some sort of sporting event being televised this weekend that has been historically used as an excuse to buy a big-screen TV. [Joel] wanted a huge-screen TV on the cheap, so he converted an overhead projector to something he can use with his XBox. Using a bare LCD panel with an overhead projector is [...]

Little, no name, 1.5 inch LCD photo key-chains are all over the place for practically nothing. Not too surprisingly these things do not vary much in the parts that they use, some flash ram, a little lipo battery and a 16 bit color LCD. Wanting to find a way to reuse that LCD [Simon] Has [...]

One of the benefits of working in IT is that there is typically a healthy supply of miscellaneous, half-functioning equipment to mess around with. [Vittore] had an old laptop with a busted LCD sitting around (Google Translation), so he figured he might as well get it to do something useful. With a spare desktop LCD [...]

[dimovi] had a spare LCD monitor sitting around and thought it would be great to convert it into a “privacy” monitor. The process is simple enough for anyone comfortable with disassembling electronics. He took apart the monitor’s plastic frame, cutting out the polarized film with a utility knife. Once the film was removed, he spent [...]

[Kaushlesh Chandel] prototyped a few projects on his Arduino that use an HD44780 Character LCD. Wanting to keep these projects in one piece, but not sacrifice his Arduino board, so he etched his own LCD backpack that is Arduino compatible. If you’ve never made it past the Arduino board to build a module that only uses [...]

[El Artis] just finished building an audio spectrum analyzer that uses a character LCD. The uses an Arduino to drive the display, but unlike other meters that use the microcontroller for analysis, [El Artis] is using a discrete IC for that task. This project uses the MSGEQ7 graphic equilizer display filter chip to grab frequency data [...]

We’re always impressed with the number of laptop displays we’re able to pick out of the trash. Most of the time the computer is borked beyond repair so we end up with a lot of functional but unusable LCD panels. As a service to us all, [EiNSTeiN_] figured out how to control an LCD panel [...]

Here’s an Android accessory project that adds a secondary LCD display. It utilizes the Android Open Accessory Development Kit standard to connect the 16×2 character LCD as a USB device. It pairs an app on the phone which runs transparently with firmware for the ATmega2560-based Arduino compatible board you see to the left. The app [...]

[Mostafa] was a bit bored and had a broken DVD player sitting around, so he decided to take it apart to see what made the machine’s LCD panel tick. Once he popped it open, he discovered it wasn’t an LCD panel at all, it was a VFD. The seven segment display looked to be controlled [...]

Hackaday forum member [Emeryth] recently posted his newest creation, the Wifon 2.0, which is an update to a project we featured last year. The second iteration of the device looks to make several improvements on the already solid concept. Ditching the simple 16×4 LCD, version 2 sports a full color 320×240 touch panel LCD. A faster [...]

[Fileark] had the backlight on his digital picture frame go out one day. These are generally Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamps which require an inverter to source the voltage necessary for proper operation. When they stop working, the inverter is usually to blame. Since that circuit is made up of pretty small surface mount circuitry, he decided to [...]

[Scott] was looking to source some LCD screens for an upcoming project, and was considering buying them from SparkFun. While the Nokia panels they sell are not expensive, they aren’t necessarily the cheapest option either – especially when building in volume. He searched around for something he could use instead, and settled on Blackberry screens. [...]

Sunlit LCD screen [A.J.] did some experiments and managed to replace his LCD backlight using fiber optics and the sun. Game Boy LCD Repair [Alan] found that he could fix dead columns on his Game Boy LCD screen with a little reflow work on the connector. 3DS Design Flaw? Anyone having problems with the way [...]

This hack is a bit older, but one aspect of the setup makes it worth sharing. Shift registers are a common component to include in a project when you need to increase the number of I/O pins available. We’ve used them to drive LCD screens before, but we never realize you could use a 595 [...]

[Devon] recently repaired a handful of Phillips LCD projectors which he was quite excited to use. The only problem is that he didn’t want to mess with replacing the bulbs after every 2000 hours of use at $100 apiece. He was pretty confident that he could find a better way to drive the projectors, so [...]

We had a basic understanding of how LCD monitors worked, and you may too. But the thing is, [Bill Hammack] doesn’t just explain the basics. Since he’s the Engineer Guy he explains the engineering principles behind how LED backlit LCD screens operate. But he does it in a way that everyone can understand. After the [...]

Inexpensive character LCDs are a popular choice for outputting data on many projects. Easily controlled , often back lit, and compact. If you have not found a reason to get one yet, here are a couple. First up is a Programmable digital timer switch. Based around a PIC15f628A micro controller this handy little device allows [...]

Seven-segment displays and monochrome LCDs are fine for most projects, but some things simply look better in color. [John] over at the Little Bird Electronics blog recently wrote up a tutorial demonstrating the use of a TFT LCD panel with an Arduino. The specific panel he chose was a 4D Systems 1.44” TFT LCD that [...]

[bill2009] wanted to reuse some common seven segment LCDs, but the question was how to drive them. Armed with a couple application notes from [Microchip] and [Atmel], an oscilloscope and an Arduino, he has made a proof of concept which shows its not super hard to drive those little reflective LCDs that so many devices [...]

This daughterboard lets [Matt Evans] drive a laptop LCD using a Beagleboard. Apparently the Beagleboard gained a VGA header when it moved to revision C but [Matt's] working with revision B4 which is why he had to do all of that ninja soldering with the blue wires. The driver board itself is a thing of [...]

[JB's] driving a Nokia 6100 LCD using an MSP430 with input from a Wii Nunchuck. He’s using the G2211 microprocessor that came with the Launchpad, and developing his code with MSP-GCC. As you can see in the video after the break, this works but there’s some room for improvement. That’s being said, he is bumping [...]

[Foobarbob] posted a pretty simple job of bringing an LCD viewfinder back to life. He doesn’t specify what was wrong, but since he replaced the backlight, we’re guessing that was the main issue. It was pulled off of a JVC camcorder. The camcorders with LCD viewfinders are getting more and more common at garage sales, [...]

[Peter Gunn] added an LCD screen to his Dockstar. Now that we think of it, this really shouldn’t be all that hard since the Dockstar can run a Linux kernel and it has USB ports. [Peter] took inspiration from [Sprite_TM's] key chain LCD4Linux hack that we looked at many moons ago. He used a cheap [...]

We’ve seen these little toys called “sugar cubes” by GirlTech around for a while now. They are a toy block, with an LCD on the front and they respond to movement, button presses and they interact with each other if you stack them up. We’re just as curious as anyone else about their internals, but [...]

[Craig] wanted to make the original Game Boy LCD screen do his bidding so he sniffed out the data protocol that it uses. We were amused when he mentions that there’s an army of people out there looking to build pointless crap as part of a hobby. Guilty. And he goes on to outline why [...]

This swivel arm LCD screen is [Ben Heck's] latest hack. It replaces the hinges that normally only allow one point of rotation on the screen. You can still use the laptop like normal, but when space is at a premium a second adjustment, both in rotation and linear position, has been added using the slots [...]

[Ben Heck] is in the Halloween spirit with his Portal inspired “see through” t-shirt. That is, a thin lcd is mounted on [Ben's] chest, with a not as thin camera mounted on his back; when the system is running, everything behind him is captured by the camera and displayed on the LCD. The concept isn’t [...]

[Neil] is driving this Siemens A60 LCD using a parallel port on his Linux box. He likes this module because it has an integrated LED back-light, controller IC, and the pads are large enough for a human to solder. He notes that the screen runs on 2.9V, which matches the forward voltage of the LEDs used [...]

[Rossum's] taking a look at the Nokia LCD screens that are both plentiful and begging to be bent to your will. For quite some time the Nokia 6100 screens have been used in a lot hacks, but he wanted to see what else is out there. He digs into his junk box of cell phones [...]

In this instructible, [wkter] takes us through the process of running a Nokia 3310 LCD display using an ATmega8. This instructible isn’t a beginners project as he assumes you already have a strong understanding of how to work with these components and their programming languages. He is very thorough with information though, providing datasheets, pinout [...]

[Pieter] is in the process of adding a turbo package to his ride. He needed a status display for the boost but didn’t have a good way to mount an additional display. He came up with the idea of using the LCD screen that’s already in the dashboard, but the specs for it were not [...]

[Viktor], one of our favorite avid hackers, has been playing around with 1-wire systems all this month. What started out as a MicroLAN Fonera has turned into an iButton interface, to a 1-wire powered hub, and finally a 1-wire character driven LCD. Anyone looking at 1-wire systems or OWFS could surely benefit from his testing.
However, [...]

[Hailrazer] is at it again with a new portable N64 build. He’s done the impossible by improving upon his last design. The LCD screen is now mounted flush for a cleaner and smaller case. The controls draw from a lot of different sources; a gamecube stick for durability, a 3rd party N64 controller for buttons, [...]

Another broken LCD TV came [Steve DiRaddo's] way. This one had a broken backlight that he wanted to fix. He scrapped his LCD light table in order use the inverter. The two televisions were not the same size, nor made by the main manufacturer, but backlights all operate under the same principles. Using an inverter [...]